


Dialogue

by apparitionism



Series: Sacrifice [2]
Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-06
Updated: 2014-12-06
Packaged: 2018-02-28 08:21:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2725511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This continues the reworking of "The Greatest Gift" holiday episode. It picks up exactly where "Sacrifice" left off...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It works out that Pete picks Myka up from the airport on New Year’s Day. They’re sitting in the car together, with an hour’s drive ahead of them, and he figures that it must be time. “So,” he starts.

“I don’t particularly want to talk about it,” she says.

How does she know? “You don’t? Why not?”

“Because it’s just all my same family stuff. It’s how it is, and it’s better sometimes and not better sometimes. It’s just how it is. There’s nothing new to say about it.”

“Okay,” Pete says. “Uh… why don’t we talk about something… else?”

“Fine. What?”

“Well, you know the thing that happened to me? The day of the snowstorm?”

“Yeah, the thing with the brush. Are you all right? There haven’t been any weird aftereffects, have there?”

Pete considers the idea, then shakes his head. For a while he could feel the strain in his vocal cords from shouting and shouting as H.G. fell, but now it’s all starting to feel kind of dreamy. Not in a bad way; just like it actually was a dream. “No, I’m fine. I’m just fine. But I didn’t get a chance to really tell you very much about it. And there’s a part that I didn’t mention at all, and I think you need to know.”

“Okay,” Myka says, giving him that look.

“It’s not bad,” he assures her. “At least, I don’t think it is. I don’t know what you’ll think about it.”

“Okay,” she says again, but now with an edge of “I might prefer it if I could jump out of the car, depending on what you say next.”

“So you know what basically happened: the whole _It’s a Wonderful Life_ deal, with me as Jimmy Stewart. Except I didn’t start the Building and Loan or get married to Donna Reed. Which kinda sucks. I always thought she was pretty hot.”

“I don’t think I need to know that,” Myka says drily.

“Right. But so I said that I got you and Artie and Claudia and Leena to help me back into the Warehouse to get to the brush, but it was all weird because MacPherson was running the place. But what I didn’t tell you was that somebody else helped.” He stops, because she draws in her breath like she knows what’s coming. He glances at her, and now he’s sure she knows. She’s about six shades paler than she was a second ago.

“Please say Mrs. Frederic,” she whispers.

“No,” Pete says. “MacPherson bronzed her.”

“Okay,” Myka says. Pete can feel the air around her get still. She’s bracing herself.

“Yeah,” he says. “It was H.G.”

“Okay,” Myka says again, like it’s the only word she knows.

“And she… so… so it was thanks to her. The whole thing. How it all worked out.”

“You said it was Artie!” Myka accuses. And that is what he said. Or rather, it was what he let them believe. He wasn’t ready to talk about H.G. yet, and he didn’t think it was fair to say it in front of everybody first, what she’d done. What she’d done _for Myka_.

He says what’s in his head. “She did it for you, Mykes. She sacrificed herself. It worked out that it saved me, but the _reason_ she did it was to save you. MacPherson was about to kill you. H.G. jumped for the brush and threw it to me so that this reality would come back. But she died doing it, Myka. She knew she was going to die, and she did it anyway. She died to save you.” It’s not the most eloquent speech he’s ever made, but he’s hoping it will make her understand. He takes his eyes from the road for a second and really looks at her. She’s almost as pale as before, but now her mouth’s open a little. Oh. It’s because she can’t breathe through her nose, which, he notices, is a little red. Because she’s crying. Dammit. Pete hates it when women cry, particularly when he’s caused it.

“Why would she do that?” Myka whispers. “You said I had my old job in D.C., you said I wasn’t even connected to the Warehouse. If I wasn’t connected to the Warehouse, how did she even know who I was?”

“She didn’t. Not until I came along. MacPherson unbronzed her, like he did here, and she ended up working for him at the Warehouse. He didn’t really trust those two agents he first sent after me, so he sent her to follow me and find out who I contacted. And I contacted you, of course, so she sort of… contacted you too.” He’s proud of himself. That sounded almost… tactful.

“But if I didn’t know her… I don’t understand. You said this all happened in a couple of days.” Myka’s shaking her head, making that new hair of hers wave like H.G.’s does. Pete hasn’t thought about that before, how much Myka’s new hair is like H.G.’s. He wonders if that’s on purpose, and if so, what the purpose would be.

“It did happen in a couple of days. You guys met, and it was like… it was like…” He hasn’t been figuring on this being quite so hard to say. But he still isn’t sure if they… like, if before Yellowstone, they had… but Pete does believe in being direct. “Okay, here it is: you two were clearly into each other. And by that I mean _into_ each other, if you know what I mean.” Now Myka’s entire face is red. Question answered? He’s still not sure. “Myka? If you don’t want to tell me, it’s okay, but—were you two… in this, in normal reality, were you two _into_ each other? Like that?”

Myka doesn’t answer. He can’t blame her, really; he’s being pushy, and she’s never been particularly interested in sharing details about her life, romantic or otherwise, with any of them. The stuff with her dad, she clearly would have been thrilled to keep that to herself. Honestly, if it wasn’t for artifacts, he’d know almost nothing about her past. He’s still thinking about this when she says, in a voice so quiet it barely hums above the car’s engine, “Sort of. Starting to. But then.”

He lets that sit for a second. Because in spite of the events that he just watched unfold, he’d almost talked himself into thinking it could have been different here in the real world. “I didn’t know,” he eventually offers. “If that helps or not, I don’t know, but I didn’t know.”

“I thought,” she chokes. She starts again, “I thought for sure you’d have a vibe and you’d know. And later I thought that you just didn’t tell me about the _bad_ vibes because you could tell I was… because it had to be so easy to see that I was…”

He understands why she can’t say it. After everything. It isn’t different for her yet, the way it’s different for him. So his job now, what he owes to H.G., is to make it different. “That you love her,” he says, as gently as he possibly can. And he says “love” instead of “loved” on purpose, because maybe that’ll make it easier for her.

But it makes her lash out: “I was such an _idiot_!” she spits. “She made a fool out of me, did nothing but lie to me, and I fell for all of it, every single lie she told. I was so pathetic. She must have been laughing at me the whole time, how easy it was to make me believe what she said.”

“I don’t think that’s completely fair to her,” Pete says.

“Oh, you’re defending her now? Where was this in Ohio, when you were fixated on making everything so much harder than it needed to be?”

“I’m telling you, I didn’t know! How did you expect me to act? All I knew was that she tried to destroy the world! It’s not like anybody explained to me that the reason she didn’t do it was that she couldn’t kill you because she loved you too much. In fact, it’s not like anybody explained much of _anything_ about that to me. I know Artie wasn’t going to, you know, give me any insight into that kind of thing, but _you_ could have said something. Instead you just ran away.” Okay, that was probably a mistake. He doesn’t want to antagonize her. But dammit, she _didn’t_ tell him anything, and she _did_ run away. As long as they’re finally talking about stuff, they might as well talk about all of it.

“So that’s what you think happened?” Myka asks, like she’s really asking. “She couldn’t kill me because she loved me too much?”

“Well, given that now I know she’s basically willing to kill herself to save you… yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. What do _you_ think happened?”

“I don’t know what happened. I put a gun in her hand and told her to kill me. She didn’t do it. That’s all I know. That’s all I want to know.”

“Why? What if there’s more to it?”

“Because!” This comes out in an anguished cry. “If I let myself think there’s more to it, I won’t stop! That has to be it! I can’t keep thinking about her like this, because it’s going to kill me. I have to forget about her!”

“But you can’t,” Pete says.

“I have to.”

“But you can’t.”

“Would you stop saying that? Listen to me: I have to.”

“I’ll stop saying mine when you stop saying yours. Because you _don’t_ have to.”

“Yes, I do.” She leans her head back and ostentatiously turns her face toward the window.

Pete sees her reflection, and he knows this look: she’s got the bottom lip between the teeth, she’s got the eyes narrowed, she’s getting ready to stop talking to him for a good long time. He doesn’t know what else he can say. But he knows he has to keep trying. “I saw how you looked at her. After Ohio and Pittsburgh, before you had to send her back to that… magic 8 Pokéball thingy. I didn’t understand it then, but I saw it. That’s not how anybody looks at somebody they can forget, no matter how much they want to. Or how much they think they should. So why don’t you just admit it, and then we can figure out something to _do_ about it?” The real question is, does she want to do something about it? Sometimes Myka likes to wallow in whatever it is, when instead she ought to be fixing it. (In his head, he hears her say “You’re such a _guy_ , Pete.” It happens every time he tries to fix something instead of sitting around having feelings.)

When she answers, she’s still facing the window; he has to strain to hear her. “There’s nothing to do,” she says.

Maybe he can make her angry enough to shout again. He goes with, “Well, that’s just a stupid thing to say.” She doesn’t say anything. Oops. “Okay, it isn’t stupid, because you don’t say stupid things, but come on! We work at the _Warehouse_. There’s always _something_ we can do. I mean, it might be ridiculous, like we could turn her into a puppy and PETA would come and demand that the Regents release her, but there’s gotta be something.”

“Pete?” she says, really softly.

“Yeah?”

“Are you saying you want to break her out of prison?”

“No, that’s not—well, kinda. I mean, I might be. So, I guess, when you get right down to it, yeah.” He grins at her expectantly. “Don’t you?”

And that sets off the waterworks again. Now the sobs are huge and honking, and he doesn’t even have a tissue or a napkin to hand her, so she’s getting kind of gross and snotty. Isn’t that one of the reasons why girls carry purses, so they’ll have kleenexes around for times like this? Actually, he thinks, that’s almost a better reason for guys to carry purses, so when they make girls cry, they’ll have kleenexes to hand them. Since handkerchiefs went away a long time ago and were pretty disgusting themselves. Pete’s not really squeamish, but the idea of folding up snot and keeping it for later just seems really…. it takes him a minute to notice that Myka’s doing that hiccup-gasp thing that comes after you stop crying.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“No,” she says, but she smiles at him. “No. I haven’t been okay since that day at Yellowstone. The only times I’ve been even close to okay are when I’ve been running for my life during some retrieval, when I couldn’t think about anything but staying on my feet and breathing. Most days I think I won’t ever be okay again.”

“Until you get her back?”

“No, Pete.” And what she says next just about breaks his heart: “Until I _die_. Because if I let myself think that it might be possible to get her back, then that’s all I’ll be able to think about. And do you really want me to have Helena on my mind when I’m supposed to be watching your back?”

“It’d be kind of weird if you did,” he agrees.

They fall silent. South Dakota passes by their windows, one snow-covered mile at a time. Just as Pete’s about to give up and turn on the radio, he hears Myka sigh. “I’m glad that you know,” she says.

“About you and H.G.? Well, I’d say ‘me too,’ but you’d probably take it the wrong way and hit me. Though I admit I might have had an impure thought or two when I found out in the me-less world that you guys were planning to… you know. And man, you were ready to go to _town_ —”

“Pete!”

“Huh?”

“Please stop talking,” Myka says.

Pete offers up a little prayer of thanks for the fact that she sounds normal again. “I’ll stop talking about _that_ if you’ll do two things.”

“And those two things are?”

“One: we come up with some kind of jailbreaky plan. Or at least some kind of probation plan. And two: you give me details later, once the two of you have your big passionate reunion.”

She turns as red as the SUV’s dashboard lights. “I don’t even know if we would,” she says.

“Trust me,” Pete says. “You would totally. Like crazy.”

“I don’t like this new thing where you know more about my love life than I do,” she grumbles.

“Ha! You said ‘love life’! Myka has a ‘love life’ and it’s with H.G.! Man, if I’d known this before, I’d’ve been _relentless_!”

“And yet you wonder why no one ever tells you anything.”

“No,” he says, honestly. “I don’t wonder at all.”

Myka puts her hand on her forehead.

“So,” he goes on, “the jailbreaky thing. Do you think we’d get anything from Mrs. Frederic? Like, could we ask her about probation or whatever? They can’t be planning to keep H.G. in that thing forever, can they? And where do you think she is, really? Pretty convenient to be able to put her brains in a magic 8 ball like that. Maybe they keep her body in a tank? Like in _Altered States_?” He’s just spitballing, but the more he talks, the more it strikes him as totally cruel and unusual, putting somebody who spent a hundred years in bronze back into some kind of suspended animation.

Myka looks pale again. “I’ve thought about all those things.”

Oh. Yeah, that’s not really a surprise. Pete realizes that he probably should have thought about those things before now, too. If only because he considers himself reasonably humane, and the Regents don’t seem to be acting in a very humane way when it comes to H.G. “So did you talk to Mrs. Frederic or anything?” he asks, suddenly hopeful.

“No, Pete. How could I? I’m not even… I’m not even really believing you when you say this is something we ought to do.” She makes a tiny noise, like a snort. “Do you know what Mrs. Frederic said to me, when she brought Helena—the hologram of her—to the bookstore, to talk me into coming back?”

“Wait, you talked to her? Before you came back?” He gets it, suddenly. “That’s what she meant about having played a part in you coming back!”

“You didn’t know that? How could you not know that?”

“How could I _not_ know? How could I _know_! You and I weren’t having a lot of heart to hearts at that point, or did you forget about all that?”

Myka looks down at her hands, which are clenched around the seat belt across her chest. “I didn’t forget. I just couldn’t talk to you, not for real. I was too busy pretending that everything was normal. I didn’t have the energy to explain anything.”

“Explain it now.”

“I’m trying. Mrs. Frederic knew I’d listen to Helena. How could I not? But what Mrs. Frederic said was, ‘She can’t hurt you.’” She starts crying again. “‘She can’t hurt you.’ How ridiculous is that? She’s the only one who could hurt me. Seeing her… that hurt worse than anything. Seeing her and feeling it all again, having her ripped away from me _again_. I don’t know how many more times I can live through that. So maybe I just can’t afford to think… because getting her back? The idea? Because what if it doesn’t work? All my hopes, again? When I know what just seeing her does to me? I don’t know how to make a plan! What happens if it doesn’t work? Keep going? Knowing she’s gone?” She’s barely saying sentences at this point, between the sobs.

He’s going to have to stop at a gas station and get her some water, or a soda, because all this crying? She’ll be thirsty for days. Now she’s wiping her nose on her sleeve, and that worries him. That’s way too messy to be normal Myka. “Hey, okay,” he says. “We don’t have to. If you really don’t want to. But I just think that trying will make you feel better than not trying.”

“But if I don’t try, then there’s always at least the possibility!” she shouts.

“I thought you said you hadn’t thought about it!”

“I was lying!”

They stare at each other until Pete realizes he’d better pay attention to the road. “You have to try,” he finally says, after a few miles.

“Stop telling me what I have to do. You’re not,” she says with a tiny, almost H.G.-like smirk, “the boss of me.”

“True,” he concedes. “But it’s not like you listen to Artie when he tells you what to do, and he _is_ the boss of you. And me. And Claud and Leena.” He considers for a second. “I actually don’t think he’s the boss of Leena. Is Mrs. Frederic the boss of Leena? Or does Leena not have a boss?”

“Neither of those things would be a surprise,” Myka says. “And when have I not listened to Artie?”

“Um… whenever it’s about H.G.?”

“And see where that got me,” she says, crossing her arms in front of her and slumping in the seat like she’s a thirteen-year-old being forced to go somewhere with her parents.

“I do see where that got you. It got you in lo-ove,” he sing-songs. “Which, seriously,” he hurries out, to forestall any sneering or arm-punching, “is a good place to be. Even if it isn’t right now, we’re going to figure out how to make a good place again. Okay? I mean, with you and me, and probably Claud, on the case, we can do anything.”

“Oh, god,” Myka groans, “you told Claudia?”

“I did not. Come on, I can keep a secret, kind of. Besides, I didn’t even know there was anything to keep a secret about, not in this reality. And I haven’t told anybody else about what really happened in the other place.”

“Thanks,” Myka says.

“But don’t you think she probably ought to know? I wouldn’t put it past her to already have a plan for getting H.G. out. She seemed even more happy to see her than you were, practically.”

“It’s bad enough that _you_ know.”

“She won’t have a problem with it. In fact, I bet she’ll be thrilled.”

“That I’m hung up on someone who tried to destroy the world? Yeah, that’d thrill anybody.”

“No, that two of her favorite people are… well, that you’re…”

“We’re not anything, when you get down to it. And I don’t see how we can be. What are we going to do, if we get her out? She’s not… she can’t… I don’t see how she can come back. Probation, whatever. Artie would never go for it. And what else would she do? She said herself that all she has is the Warehouse.”

“I don’t know. Volunteer work?”

Myka snorts. “Yeah. I totally see her collecting donations for the food bank.”

“It might make it even clearer to her that the world doesn’t need to end,” Pete points out.

“She seems to get that now,” Myka reminds him.

“Well, so, there you go.”

“This is all just talk, Pete. We can try to talk to Mrs. Frederic, but please believe me when I tell you that I don’t want to get my hopes up.”

At least she sounds calm about it now. That’s a big improvement. “I think, just for yourself, you need to have some idea of what they plan to do with her. If it’s, like, a life sentence. Because couldn’t we be witnesses at her probation hearing? We know what she did in Pittsburgh.”

“I’m sure Mrs. Frederic and the Regents know what she did in Pittsburgh. It doesn’t seem to have made any difference. I haven’t heard—I mean, there hasn’t been anything—” Myka abruptly shuts her mouth.

“You think,” Pete guesses, “that they would let her get in touch with you. If anything had changed.” Myka doesn’t say anything, but her posture shifts. “Maybe…”

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe H.G. thinks you don’t want to hear from her. Obviously you weren’t as hostile to her as I was, but it wasn’t like you were all ‘I miss you so much, honey.’” Now she’s glaring at him. “What? You weren’t!”

“Because that would have been so appropriate. And there was so much time for it, too, what with you yelling all the time and some guy trying to blow up a ballpark.”

“You cannot get mad at me for being mad at her. That is not fair. And I’m apologizing for it, okay? One more time: I didn’t know.”

“You had every right to be mad at her. You still do, no matter what happened in that other place. That wasn’t this Helena. That Helena didn’t get those kids killed. She didn’t run Kelly off.” She rubs at her eyes. “When you think about it, it was meeting you and me that made her do those things, then, wasn’t it? Doesn’t that make that whole thing our fault?”

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

Pete hasn’t considered this: if he and Myka hadn’t been chasing H.G., she would have just gotten unbronzed and started working for MacPherson. “But wouldn’t you think she’d’ve ended up hating the world _more_ with MacPherson in charge of the Warehouse? And, more importantly, without you around to have the hots for?”

“Because me being around had such a calming effect on her,” Myka says bitterly.

“There’s a lot we don’t know about how H.G. thinks,” Pete says.

“Truer words were never spoken.”

“And we’ll never find out if we don’t get her back.”

“I don’t think Artie’s going to find that a very compelling argument.”

“Maybe we can start small. Maybe the Regents could let her write to you, or call you, or visit from the Pokéball. Or you could visit her, or write or call or something.. Even if she was in some kind of solitary confinement before, _that_ had to change after Pittsburgh. Everybody gets to have visitors.”

“Helena isn’t everybody. And Regent prison can’t be like normal prison. It’s probably a lot more scary. You said it yourself. Several times.”

“I did, didn’t I. I should probably apologize for that too. To both of you. You probably didn’t like hearing that.”

“I didn’t like any of it. I didn’t like that she was there, I didn’t like that that was the only time I was ever going to see her, I didn’t like you being mad at her, I didn’t like Claudia looking at her like she hung the moon. And Artie goes without saying. I could go the rest of my life without seeing the two of them in a room together again.” Now she really sounds like a teenager.

“Aw, your dad doesn’t like your girlfriend,” he teases.

She rubs her eyes again. “Yeah. Not to mention, my actual dad would _hate_ my girlfriend. If she ever in fact became my girlfriend, which she won’t, but even if she did, I just don’t see taking Helena home and saying ‘hey Mom and Dad, guess what, I’m with a woman, and it’s H.G. Wells!’ They already think that what we do is crazy.”

“What we do _is_ crazy.”

“I know that. But that doesn’t mean I want my parents thinking it. Because even though they obviously know part of it, they don’t know enough for me to really talk to them about it, and even in spite of that, or maybe I guess because of it, we just sort of got to a point where it isn’t quite as… I don’t know, quite as fraught. Can you even begin to imagine Helena in the midst of all that?”

“Actually, yeah. Wouldn’t she do her suave thing and charm your parents to death?” Oops. He has _got_ to get better about thinking before he says words; Myka does tell him that all the time, and apparently she’s right. “Sorry, bad choice of words. Not ‘to death.’ But don’t you think they’d think she was cool for being all upper-crusty and British?”

“Maybe. Once they got over the total shock of who she is, which would take _forever_.”

“I don’t see why you’d have to tell them. Couldn’t she just be Helena Wells, a fellow agent who happens to be from England?”

Myka blinks at him. “That hadn’t occurred to me,” she admits.

“See, and I know why: because you want to show her off. Particularly to your dad, because you two are such nerdy bookworms together. You want him to know who she is, and you want him to be impressed. By her, because of who she is, and by you, because you managed to snag her.”

“And bag her and tag her?” Now Myka’s really smiling.

“As far as I can tell, yeah. Signed, sealed, and delivered, she’s yours.”

“Who wouldn’t want to show her off?” Myka asks.

“She can be hot sometimes,” Pete concedes. “When she’s not being all evil and… okay, we probably shouldn’t talk about that anymore. Because I don’t want to get mad again. I like it better if she’s just your girlfriend and not a crazy person.”

“She never won’t be crazy,” Myka says. “At least a little. She got bronzed, Pete. That did things to her. She knows it. I know it.”

“But you don’t care.”

“It’s not that I don’t care. I care a lot. Before Egypt, I was trying to figure out how to help her really _deal_ with what happened to her: her child being murdered, what she did to the men who did it, what happened to her partner, the bronzing. All of it. It’s more of a surprise to me that it took her so long to snap than that she snapped in the first place.”

“But she didn’t snap.”

“Didn’t snap? I think being one trident-strike away from ending the world—”

“No, I mean in the other timeline. Because it was already later then, there, than it was, here, when she did it.”

“You’re making my head hurt.”

Pete’s just thought of this, and he’s not quite sure why, but it seems like everything he thought he’d made sense of, he’s having to go back and figure out all over again. “But what if that was the real her? What if she wasn’t herself when she was being all evil?”

Myka starts running silent again, and he wishes he’d never brought it up. But after a while, she says, “I used to hope for that. That we’d find out it wasn’t really _her_ doing all those things. That she’d been under the influence of some artifact. Because that would make it all right, wouldn’t it? If somebody’s doing something to us with an artifact, we’re not really responsible.” She shakes her head.

“But that’s true, right? So what if that’s what happened?”

Myka takes a breath. “I think your other timeline makes it clear that that _isn’t_ what happened. Because I think MacPherson probably knew before he let her out—and no, I don’t know how he knew—that she had this big trident plan. And he thought he could control her. And your other reality shows that he could. But I think she was always a grenade. The only difference is that we didn’t _know_ she was. MacPherson knew, so he could figure out a way, or lots of ways, maybe artifacty ways, to keep the pin in, or maybe even disarm her entirely.”

“So it really is my fault. Without me, she could have been fine.”

“Why didn’t you try to find Kelly?” Myka asks abruptly.

“What? Find Kelly where?”

“In the other reality. Why didn’t you try to find her? You could have just found her and gotten a real job and made her fall in love with you again and lived your whole life with her.”

That hits him hard. So hard, in fact, that he’s sure for a second that he’s going to hit _her_. God, now he needs a drink, and he can’t drive when he needs a drink, so he pulls onto the shoulder of the highway, and they bump along until he can slow down and stop. He breathes in and out, really consciously, trying to get himself back to normal, not the normal of needing a drink, which is so familiar that he almost has himself talked into it, but the normal of how he’s goofy Pete and she’s uptight Myka.

He can’t get there. He feels himself breathing harder. “Why would you say that?” he grits at her. “Why would you even think about that? I’m trying to be nice to you, and I don’t understand why you would want to make me feel like this!” He refuses to cry. He refuses to start crying.

Myka looks as stunned as if he had just gone ahead and hit her. “I don’t understand what you’re feeling,” she says, and it’s amazing that a woman so tall can sound so tiny. It’s almost how she sounded when she came back to the Warehouse. Great. He and H.G. are both really stellar at making Myka less than she is. She says, still small, “I was trying to show you that you were thinking about the Warehouse. Because Helena might have been fine, but the Warehouse wasn’t. And that’s what you were focused on.”

“That _is_ what I was focused on. I didn’t even _think_ about Kelly,” he says, and it _hurts_ to say that. He doesn’t want to be over her; he loved her, or he was really close to loving her, and if he was wrong and he didn’t actually love her, what does that say about the fact that he was ready to say that she was the only one for him? And if that was true, how could he forget her? Now he’s jealous of Myka, of her and H.G., and it’s unreasonable and he knows it, but he also knows that she would never not think of it. “If it had been you, you would have gone straight to the Bronze Sector, wouldn’t you. To see if she was there. And if she wasn’t, you would have tried everything you could to find her, to find out if she’d been there and got let out, or never got bronzed at all. Wouldn’t you.” He doesn’t bother making it a question. It isn’t a question.

“Oh,” Myka says. He _hates_ that “oh.” It means she’s pitying him. But then she says, “I would trade you.”

“That isn’t true,” he says.

“Okay. I wouldn’t. But I wish I knew how to want to. Because I’ll never get over it. I’ll _never_ get over it. And that’s… it’s all tied up with time, isn’t it? The future’s gone for me, because I can’t forget the past. But you _have_ a future. And I’m jealous.”

“I’m jealous too,” he admits. He feels the urge to violence, the need to taste something harsh, start to drain away.

“Of what? My fabulous romantic track record?” She hiccups.

“You know what,” he says, “or you wouldn’t have asked about Kelly.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “You were already blaming yourself, and I made it worse. I didn’t think.”

“That’s weird. For you, I mean. It’s pretty normal for me.”

“I just… you would clearly never do that. Give up on the Warehouse, I mean. In that timeline or this one.”

“Well, you know. You tried it,” he points out. “It didn’t work. You had to come back.”

“I didn’t _have to_ come back. I just knew that I’d be less miserable if I did. In a bookstore, you have way too much time to think. And after the thing with Mrs. Frederic, when she brought Helena, I couldn’t push it away anymore. And if I couldn’t push it away, then I might as well be where I’m reminded every day, but at least I get some times when I don’t have any time at all to think.”

“I really thought it was about not trusting yourself anymore. Like, H.G. fooled you, and you thought it meant you were really… foolable.”

“I do think it means I was really foolable. But only once. I know it won’t happen again.”

“How?”

“Pete. The walls around my heart are so high now that I couldn’t see over them if I were standing on a skyscraper. The one thing Helena did for me was make me absolutely impregnable.”

“Wait… you can’t get pregnant? How’d she do that?”

Myka sighs. “Don’t ever change, Pete,” she says. “Not that you could. Impregnable in the sense of, no one is getting near my heart.”

“That’s when it happens, though—when you’re sure it can’t.”

Tears again. “Was that to get back at me for asking about Kelly? Just smack me in the face with the idea that I’m going to fall for somebody else?”

“Hold it. You just said you wished you knew how to want to trade! If you fell for somebody else, then you’d have a future and all that.”

“I lied about that too. I don’t want to want to trade. I just want to love her until I die.”

“I thought so. You think I don’t understand these things, but I get it better than you think. Here’s another one for you: Pining for her’s a lot easier than actually taking steps to make it real.”

Myka starts tapping her head against her window, softly at first, then harder. “There are only so many things I can do at once, Pete!” she shouts at him. “And figuring out what can and can’t be real is just too hard! I can barely figure out what is and isn’t real! On a daily basis! So don’t tell me that I’m taking some kind of easy way out by being a little _reluctant_ to take steps to try to get a crazy woman out of prison so that we can live happily ever after! Okay?” She leans forward and lays her head on the dashboard.

“Okay,” he says, trying to soothe her. Maybe he did say it to get back at her, a little bit. And it’s true that she’s been trying to deal with this for a lot longer than he’s had to think about it. And it’s also true that Myka always needs time to work herself up to doing big things, and this is probably one of the biggest things.

And then he gets an idea. “Here it is,” he says excitedly. “Here’s what we do! We say that we need her help again!”

Myka doesn’t raise her head. She doesn’t even twitch.

Fine. “Fine, pretend like you’re not listening. But I know you are. We figure out how she can help with whatever the next case turns out to be. Or the one after that, or whatever. And then, when we’ve got her little projector doohickey in our possession, that’s when we make our case. And she could help too, because of the whole smartypants genius thing. And it’d be an even stronger case then, on account of she’d have helped again. Right?”

Myka’s voice is muffled, because she’s basically talking to the glove compartment, but at least she’s talking: “That isn’t the worst idea ever.”

“The thing is, this has to be mostly you. You’re the one who’s read all her files and everything. Is there anything we could go looking for right off the bat? Something she came close to finding but didn’t quite? That for some reason we really really need to find, in such a big way that even Artie would have to go for it?”

“You know what I’m tired of?” Myka says. She raises her head, finally. “I’m tired of having to fight with Artie all the time. Even now that we’re not fighting anymore, I’m still always having every single fight he and I had about her. And he wins, obviously, because he was right, but I still… I know he won’t ever trust me again, and that’s really fine, but—”

Pete hurries to say, “I’m sure he trusts you, Mykes, but these things take time—”

“No, he really doesn’t, but it’s okay. I thought it would bother me more than it does. The thing that bothers me is what bothered me before, all the hostility, which is funny because it’s so much more justified now; you’d think I’d be able to say, okay, she shot him and there was the trident and everything. But it just makes me that much angrier, like he can’t let it go, even though he won. Like it’s a little victory lap for him, to throw it in my face.”

“I think maybe that isn’t actually happening,” Pete hazards.

“What, I’m projecting? Because I’m the one who’s still mad? Probably. I told you, I can’t figure out what is and isn’t real. You know, thank god I wasn’t the one who touched that brush. I probably would’ve needed to be locked up like Claudia was, and for real reasons, not the fake ones that got her put away.”

“You would’ve been fine,” Pete says. He’s not really sure that’s true, but he says what he thinks she needs him to say, “You would’ve found all of us, including H.G., and you would’ve fixed it. Except you probably could’ve done it for yourself instead of needing H.G. to do it all, like I did.”

“Maybe. Or I might have decided the world would have been better off without me and just… I don’t know, destroyed the brush myself? What if Helena was happy? What if everybody was happy?”

“Now you’re just being silly. How could we be happy without you?”

“You were fine without me when I was gone.”

Pete rolls his eyes. “Now that really _is_ a stupid thing to say. You know I wasn’t fine. Claudia wasn’t fine, Artie and Leena weren’t fine.” He bobs his head. “Steve was fine. But that was only because he didn’t know you. He wouldn’t be fine if you left now.”

“Oh, of course he would. He’d be fine without all of us except Claudia. He seems like that sort of guy.”

“Maybe so. But I like Steve. Not as much as Claud does, but I like him.”

“I’m not saying I don’t like him. I like him fine. He seems… I don’t know, maybe too sweet to be a Warehouse agent?”

“Oh, so now you’re saying _I’m_ not sweet? I’m incredibly sweet. I’m banana-split sweet. I’m ‘oops, I accidentally poured all the sugar in the sugar bowl into my coffee’ sweet.”

“I’ll stipulate that you’re banana-split sweet. I’m not so sure about the other thing.”

“Ooooh, but I bet you think H.G.’s that sweet,” he teases.

Myka punches him in the arm. Now _this_ , he thinks, is progress. She hasn’t punched him, not like this, since Pittsburgh.

She says, “I am so fervently glad that you didn’t find out about this before now. I see that I would have had to do something drastic.”

“In the other reality, you were pretty mad at me for getting in the way of the two of you… you know. And you didn’t even _know_ me. So yeah, I can imagine how you wouldn’t be able to handle even the tiniest bit of mocking.”

“Because being mocked about something like this is every girl’s dream.”

“H.G. wouldn’t mind. I bet she’d think it was funny. She’s into the witty repartee.”

“Witty repartee?” She’s got her eyebrow raised. With the new hair and that eyebrow, she _really_ looks like she’s playing the part of “H.G. Wells” in some community theater production. “What exactly counts as witty repartee?”

“Uh… H.G. and Myka, sittin’ in a tree?”

“In what universe do you actually live?”

“Here’s what’s good,” Pete says. “You aren’t thinking about any of the bad parts right now. Which is why we have to get her out and move on to that witty repartee stage, where I give you grief and you hit me and she smirks at the both of us. Because none of the rest of it is going to feel right until that happens. And you’re just about ready to scream from how tired you are of nothing feeling right, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she says.

She wouldn’t have said that, when they first started talking. She wouldn’t have been willing to admit that it was just that simple. Pete holds out his right hand to her. “Shake on it, partner,” he says.

END (because, you know, then Sykes and Emily Lake and chess lock, and they never had the time)


End file.
